MORNING MINDMELD, from GOP Senate aide whose boss favors immigration reform: “The … analysis that the Boston attacks are a setback for immigration reform appears wrongheaded, as we learn more about the story. The fault here wasn’t our immigration system, since the suspects immigrated legally a decade ago as kids and apparently were radicalized here. If anything, the fault lies with our society and domestic intelligence services. Given the facts, the events in Boston seem unlikely to stoke nativist sentiments that may derail immigration reform. To the contrary, to the extent it renews fears of terrorism, it will strengthen the case for reform, since the bipartisan proposal fixes major gaps in our national security posture (by implementing a visa-exit system, registering and background-checking undocumented immigrants, gaining 100% awareness of our southern border, etc.).”

I want to know how a “society” that granted the family asylum and then gave Dzhokhar money to go to school is culpable in the bombing. Dzhokhar, at least, seemed well assimilated given the number of classmates who’ve been babbling to the media about how nice and normal and chill he was. Maybe the problem has more to do with him being a sociopath than with “society”?

Nice job, though, by the GOP aide in throwing the word “nativist” in there even though most amnesty opponents on the right support legal immigration. How does a left-wing buzzword like that end up in a Republican aide’s statement? Very easily, actually: Turns out it’s not the first time conservative staffers have resorted to liberal smears lately in defense of the bill. Conn Carroll:

Yesterday, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., spokesman Alex Conant caused a bit of a stir when he argued against granting permanent legal residence to illegal immigrants by claiming, “We haven’t had a cohort of people living permanently in US without full rights of citizenship since slavery.”…

Not only is Rubio’s permanent-residents-are-slaves argument a leftist talking point, but it is also dead wrong.

For starters, Rubio’s bill doesn’t even solve the problem. Only 40 percent of the illegal immigrants who received permanent legal resident status through the 1986 amnesty went on to obtain citizenship. That means, by Rubio’s leftist logic, 60 percent of those who took advantage of the 86 amnesty are still suffering as slaves in the United States today. And Rubio has repeatedly bragged that his path to citizenship will be tougher than the 1986 path. That means even fewer currently illegal immigrants will go on to become citizens under Rubio’s plan. How dare Rubio propose a plan that creates millions of new legal-resident slaves!

More importantly, there just is no comparison between slaves, who were brought and kept here against their will, with immigrants who came here and stay here by choice.

Read his post for examples of leftists using the “slavery” analogy to browbeat amnesty opponents. There’s nothing new about this sort of demagoguery on the GOP side. Lindsey Graham famously reassured his audience in a speech to the National Council of La Raza in 2007 that pro-amnesty forces in the Senate were going to tell “the bigots” to shut up, by which he meant “those opposed to Ted Kennedy’s immigration plan.” McCain once compared opponents of tax breaks for amnestied illegals to supporters of Jim Crow lawson the Senate floor. These are the people who are masterminding the Gang of Eight bill today; go figure that Rubio and his staff would fall into the same habits. And the punchline is, the “slavery” argument being used by Republicans against the right here will be used by the left against Republicans to speed up the path to citizenship if/when this bill finally passes. I’ve seen a dozen news stories over the past week emphasizing that the process in its proposed form will take 15-20 years for the average illegal, but by Team Rubio’s own logic, that’s 15-20 of quasi-slavery. When Schumer et al. turn around three years from now and demand an expedited process in the name of not replicating some immigration version of Jim Crow, what will be the reply?

Says Erickson:

I want an immigration reform plan that will solve the problems we now have with unskilled workers who come here illegally. I am not sure that the proposed plan will do that. What I do know is that conservatives should be deeply skeptical of Republicans who call upstanding conservatives racists and baby killers while allying themselves with the race baiters and baby killers of the left on this issue.

The damage Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and Bush staffers did in 2005-2006 has not been undone. They called many Republicans bigots and racists who were not, but who stood in the way of their comprehensive approach to immigration. That created a great deal of distrust and animosity on this issue. Instead of trying to understand the legitimate concerns of those who opposed their plan, they tarred and feathered them all.

Free advice to Rubio and the Gang of Eight: The quickest way to light a fire under the asses of amnesty opponents, who’ve done little more than mutter under their breaths so far (like me), is to keep up this sort of demagoguery. Rubio’s done a nifty job defanging the opposition with his charm offensive on talk radio. Once the charm disappears, all that’s left is a guy defending a bill that’s not much better on the merits than the McCain/Kennedy immigration bills of five years ago. Seriously, read Byron York on how feeble the bill’s border enforcement provisions are. If DHS can’t secure the border in five years, the “border commission” will issue a report recommending next steps and … that’s it. That’s the end of enforcement requirements. No wonder Democrats can’t help chirping excitedly to reporters about all the concessions they received in the bill. Obama, whom people like Ted Cruz have accused of wanting to sabotage the bill, is actually going to have OFA campaign on its behalf. Not only are we getting demagogued, we’re being steamrolled on top of it.

On Friday I was one of only two witnesses (the other being Douglas Holtz-Eakin) to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the comprehensive immigration-reform bill. My comments here are not about the substance of my testimony, but about process.

The proposed measure is poised to profoundly reorder our society, both economically and sociologically, and the Gang of Eight drops a bewilderingly complex 844-page bill with innumerable moving parts — a bill drafted behind closed doors on the rest of the Senate only 48 hours before the hearing. There was hardly time to absorb more than the title and preamble before the hearing, at a time when most of the nation and Congress were rightly occupied with the hunt for the surviving Boston Marathon bomber (indeed, the only other witness scheduled to testify was DHS secretary Janet Napolitano, who had to cancel due to the developments involving the imminent capture of the suspect)…

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this process is an abomination. I’ve testified numerous times before the judiciary committee, including the confirmation hearings of the last four nominees to the Supreme Court. Never has the committee treated a matter of such magnitude so cavalierly. One member of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body used his limited time on Friday to ask me just one urgent question — about my Wikipedia page.

Update: Almost forgot: How many Senate votes is our ostensibly anti-pork GOP prepared to buy by sticking political favors into the bill? Turns out there’s already stuff in there for Rubio (help for Florida’s cruise-ship industry) and Democratic “Gang” member Michael Bennet.

Update: Rubio spokesman Alex Conant e-mails:

I regret evoking slavery in the context of the current debate because obviously there’s no comparison between the plight of slaves and today’s illegal immigrants. The point I was trying to make (in 140 characters) is that allowing immigrants to apply for permanent residence, but not eventually be able to apply for the full benefits of citizenship, has been tried and failed, and has had disastrous social consequences in Europe today.

Blowback

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The irony being that the many of the cronies that wrote the amnesty bill are the same cronies that have prevented the government from enforcing our immigration laws all of these years so they can exploit illegal immigration. They’re also the same cronies that will make sure that immigration law isn’t enforced in the future, whether amnesty passes or not, to ensure that there is a constant flow of ever more illegal aliens for them to exploit. If illegal aliens are like slaves it’s the government and their cronies who are the ones exploiting them.

Terry E, channeling Rubio, channeling his inner Schumer. You are all a bunch of lying liberal twits. The system isn’t “broken”; we just refuse to enforce the law, and when the inevitable flood of invaders comes, you identify with the invaders and not with your fellow Americans.

Illegal immigration is not healthy, and is illegal. By first enabling, then tolerating, and then rewarding illegal immigration, you are actively pursuing the destruction of this country. And remember … I’m a moderate on the illegal invasion. I would give them legal residency the moment the border is fully secure, and probably agree to a program which eventually allows citizenship.

But these lying scum have no plan to secure the border and are driven by an amnesty lust with disregard for the border.

The contentious immigration bill (S. 744) put together by the Senate Gang of Eight is a spending Trojan Horse with several provisions that simply declare open season on spending, allowing agencies to spend “as necessary.”

Some of the specifics:

Analysts are still working through the 844-page bill, but even after a full analysis is done, it may not be possible to accurately quantify the cost of the bill. Here is a list of some of the identified spending in the bill:

Page 25: $6.5 billion of general revenue to be transferred to the new Comprehensive Immigration Reform Trust Fund, which includes:

$1 billion for startup costs to implement the act,
$3 billion for the Southern Border Security Strategy,
$1.5 billion for additional fencing,
$2 billion to seek to achieve persistent surveillance and an effectiveness rate of 90 percent or higher,
$50 million per year to increase the number of border crossing prosecutions to 201 prosecutions per day, and
$50 million each year for Operation Stonegarden (90 percent to be allocated toward grants and reimbursements to southwest border state law enforcement agencies).

Pages 42, 43: Equipment funding as necessary in addition to any appropriate funds for U.S. Customs and Border Protection from 2014 through 2018—mobile, video, agent-portable surveillance systems, unmanned aerial vehicles (to be deployed 24/7 along the southern border);

Page 43: Grants as necessary for individuals residing or working in the border region who lack cellular service to purchase satellite telephone communications services;

Page 45: Funds as necessary to purchase radios for border law enforcement agents and upgrade the Department of Justice’s communications network; and

Page 131: $50 million in taxpayer-funded grants to nonprofit organizations to assist eligible immigration applicants in understanding and meeting the law’s requirements.

That Rubio “charm offensive” wore off and became merely offensive rather quickly.

Slavery

Nativist

Society (i.e., you and me) is to blame for the Tsarnaevs.

Last time around Republican amnesty pushers thought insulting Americans was the best way to win. They’re doing it again. It’s interesting how D.C.’s contempt for the citizens who are their bosses always comes out on this issue.

I regret evoking slavery in the context of the current debate because obviously there’s no comparison between the plight of slaves and today’s illegal immigrants. The point I was trying to make (in 140 characters) is that allowing immigrants to apply for permanent residence, but not eventually be able to apply for the full benefits of citizenship, has been tried and failed, and has had disastrous social consequences in Europe today.

Take a flying leap.

Thanks for holding this guy accountable, AP and HotAir. Rubio needs to find someone less inflammatory to those who are supposed to be on his side. If he’s smart, he will.

His e-mail excuse is simply a lie to try to walk back what he said. His clear intent was an old propaganda technique—doing some name calling of opponents by implying they were the equivalents of slavers.

That’s ratcheting things up a bit from merely calling us bigots or xenophobic.

Just do everyone a favor and shut up. Even Bob Beckel understands we have a problem with immigration.

RovesChins on April 22, 2013 at 6:59 PM

Kind of sad to see what’s happened to her. She’s been on HA a long time but hasn’t been around much recently. She showed up a few days ago and went on a similar rant in support of the Toomey/Obama gun control measures and then disappeared.

Every damn week the GOP, the party I used to vote for, gives the rest of us yet another reason to blow them off. Now it’s Rubio’s spokesman saying that people who are anti-amnesty are pro-slavery. We voters get told at election time that we have to vote GOP to keep the Democrats out of power, but what the hell good does that do if the two parties are more and more pushing for the same things?

I’m really coming around to the idea that there is no political solution for our problems and that nothing is really going to be solved in the voting booth anymore — not unless the current system is overturned or collapses.

Rubio constantly tells us that it is impossible to deport 11 million people. Think about that? So by his reasoning he is admitting that the whole immigration debate is useless. Why even bother if you are a Repub? Whats in it for you? I know whats in it for the Dems, 11 million guaranteed new Dem voters. If by your own admission you cannot get rid of the illegals then you are admitting you can do nothing to stop any more coming in. Essentially open borders. In a sane world where we were being ruled by sane people elected by sane, informed voters the only debate we would be hearing about was what size and form a border fence should take, how many additional armed border agents would it take to staff it and how long it would take to construct it. But we don’t live in a sane world. About the only thing I can guarantee is that Rubio,s political aspirations as a Repub are done. What we have ladies and gentlemen is a future Jumpin Jim Jeffords. Look for Rubio to switch parties in 3…2…1

His e-mail excuse is simply a lie to try to walk back what he said. His clear intent was an old propaganda technique—doing some name calling of opponents by implying they were the equivalents of slavers.

That’s ratcheting things up a bit from merely calling us bigots or xenophobic.

INC on April 22, 2013 at 8:37 PM

i don’t know what his angle was but I do believe that some of the biggest supporters of amnesty want them simply because they can pay them a lot less, and treat them a lot worse, than they would have to pay, and treat, Americans. They would probably like to pay them nothing.

I’m really coming around to the idea that there is no political solution for our problems and that nothing is really going to be solved in the voting booth anymore — not unless the current system is overturned or collapses.

The root causes of terrorism are found in places that inspire, encourage, and are positive toward jihad and violence, where highly Shari’a-adherent behavior is practiced, and where a society exists that in some form promotes a culture of martyrdom or at least engages in activities that are supportive of violent jihad. Where can we possibly find this environment in “our society”? If American Muslims, (native-born as well as naturalized), are being radicalized, isn’t it being done by Islamists?
Mosques like the Islamic Society of Bostonmust be the first society that undergoes scrutiny.

The Dirty Little “Secret”: The reason that politician supporters of “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” want it is so that they and/or their campaign contributors can have serf labor. They would probably prefer actual out-and-out slaves but that is illegal. “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” Democrats, like Obama, also want it so that those who are now illegal can become legal and vote for them, if they aren’t voting for them already.

Does anyone think that any of these “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” politicians actually care one wit otherwise for the illegals. Does anyone think that any of the “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” politicians are going to invite these Mexican Indios and Mezclados to join their elite/exclusive golf clubs? Come to live in their gated communities, other than as servants? Invite them to their yachts, other than as low paid deck hands and/or servants? Invite them to their cocktail parties? Introduce them to their daughters?

The big majority of the Mexicans who have come here/will come here are Indios and Mezclados, not the Spanish descendant fair-skinned ruling class of Mexico. This is a form of ethnic cleansing by Mexico’s ruling class. So these “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” politicians are aiding and abetting and facilitating ethnic cleansing. If the U.N. were not such a joke, they would all be standing trial for trying to reintroduce a form of latter-day-slavery in the United States and for the mass ethnic cleansing of Mexico.

Terrye on April 22, 2013 at 5:42 PM
Just do everyone a favor and shut up. Even Bob Beckel understands we have a problem with immigration.

RovesChins on April 22, 2013 at 6:59 PM

Kind of sad to see what’s happened to her. She’s been on HA a long time but hasn’t been around much recently. She showed up a few days ago and went on a similar rant in support of the Toomey/Obama gun control measures and then disappeared.

Doomberg on April 22, 2013 at 9:12 PM

I’ve only been here and able to comment for a little while, but I’ve been lurking for awhile. Terrye can always be counted on to bring the RINO side to the party.

I’m not going to try to talk Republicans out of political suicide this time. I read Paul Ryan is pushing this traitorous bill and I heard Grover Norquist schilling for it today. They can go ahead and pass it. I’m through fighting them. They can compete with the democrats for La Raza’s endorsement.

This guy and the Chechnian president who commented a few days ago are wrong where they’re coming from but right in a way without even knowing it. Hear me out – we have to take some of the blame when we allow our society to be castrated by socialists and political correctness and pussyfoot round terrorists and an evil political ideology that pretends to be a religion. We’ve got to start fighting back for real and if that means dumping our so-called conservative parties that are really centre-left vote grubbers then so be it. The alternative will be fighting on the streets in 20 or 30 years time (or maybe as little as 10 in some European countries).

Comprehensive Immigration reform is code word for amnesty for PEOPLE that HIRE illegal labor!

Maybe the slavery of being held accountable for hireing illegal labor is what the Rubio spokesman was referring to. Cooking the books and stiffing BOTH the workers and the government of cash is a major burden on the lawless.

Look for massive amounts of cash to be exchanged among the corrupt people that hire illegal labor and desire this amnesty. Remember that once this amnesty becomes law, ALL of these criminal employers are ‘free at last’.

As a point of interest, in the 1986 amnesty it was disclosed that MANY members of congress, like Pelosi and Feinstein, had hired illegal alien nanies. Of course, they both voted for an amnesty for themselves in 1986 and they will vote for ANOTHER amnesty for their current illegal hiring activities!

The vast majority of the corrupt politicians in Washington have no use for any law that interrupts their desire for money and power! One needs to look no farther than their quiet repeal of the STOCK act last week to see the depth of the corruption. I guess they were all about to be prosecuted for using inside information to STEAL!

Alert readers will notice that the gang of eight left out rules about Chechnyan terrorists and Saudi radicals being able to move freely around the country. Yes, they thought this was just about approving a few more gardeners and leaf-blowers from Mexico (and their small and productive families).

Obama wants this to crash with Rubio in the driving seat. Schumer, Graham and McCain can come back to this issue any time they want. Bennet and Flak are just happy to be in the news. Rubio may know now it’s a disaster but he wants to be the only GOP hopeful who tried. Menendez is just thinking about his next unsupervised trip south of the border.

Yeah, let’s come back to this immigration thing when we’ve stabilized the security problem and the inability of government to protect citizens from easily-identifiable lunatics and enemies of society.

If you are going to blame a piece of legislation that is not even a law for a terrorist attack carried out by people who entered the country legally then why not go whole hog?

Terrye on April 22, 2013 at 5:42 PM

I’m sorry, what were you saying? I was busy watching a bunch of swat teams/feds going door to door in Watertown MA, with “weapons of war” looking for one lone teen terrorist that a resident found with they unlocked the lockdown. Maybe we need more TSA agents groping people? Or we could actually enforce laws? Nah, just pass more laws that do nothing and aren’t enforced.

It is not necessary to eat an elephant in one bite. Just deport the ones you can grab. And do that every day. Fill up one extra bus in each of 5 major cities per day and drive it to Mexico. It won’t solve the problem. But it will make a start.

I am a bit disturbed by a group of 8 Senators working in secret to create a bill away from their colleagues, then trying to foist that bill upon them and rush it to a vote before anyone can read, interpret and measure its effects on our country.

In the old days, we called this oligarchical and anti-democratic.

We’ve structured our Senate around 100 people who represent all states. Not 8 who purport to possess some special wisdom and seek through brute force, obscurity, back-room deals and demagoguery to impose their will upon us.

That process is not wise, measured or constitutional by any standard. What do they fear from open debate, opinion and fact finding- the truth?

On that process alone I won’t support this bill or the senators who have sponsored it.

I wrote Rubio and told him that if he ever voted for a bill that granted citizenship to an illegal alien “EVER”, I would consider him in the same class and Obama, Reid and Pelosi. He’ll be done as a Republican and may as well change parties.

Lindsey Graham will be primaried.The question is whether it will be a viable conservative alternative with enough name recognition and a sufficient warchest who does it.And whoever it may be best start now,since Graham is already conning people with ads boasting about his conservative bona fides.Graham has gotten away with this for years,primarily because he has a huge warchest that targets a demographic that proclaims to be conservatives but have little knowledge of Graham’s heresy.

On that process alone I won’t support this bill or the senators who have sponsored it.

Marcus Traianus on April 23, 2013 at 2:23 PM

I agree, this is the process used to get Obamacare and look what we got.

It’s OK for “Gang-of” politicians to launch trial-balloons but they cannot speak for representatives as a whole. They had no business drafting the actual legislation. They need to be punished by the voters for this.

Why on God’s green earth do republicans think they’ll be punished if they don’t support ‘amnesty’? Did blacks punish democrats for fighting against the civil rights act in the 1960′s? Did blacks reward republicans for overwhelmingly supporting this legislation back in the 60′s?